ilife

Hi, I bought a MBP last april, I have gone through hours of frustration with imove 09 and it's complete crap, I'm trying to do a quick job for one of the partners at my firm. I have used imovie HD before and it was really easy to use and seemed to have some features that I need that imovie 09 does not.

My MBP came loaded with imovie etc when I bought it, but it didn't come with ilife? I can't install the imovie HD since it says that I must have ilife.

First things first, you do have iLife on your Mac. iMovie is one of the applications; the others are iPhoto, iDVD, Garageband, iWeb. Where are you trying to install iMovie HD from?

iMovie 6 is no longer downloadable from Apple's website. They posted it temporarily for iLife '08 users who were having trouble adjusting to the sudden transition in features and new interface layout. My guess is that whatever you downloaded is scanning for a file that was unique to iLife '08, could be a plist or some other application support file.

The way I hear it one of the software developers for iLife '08 took a family vacation and was stunned at how unwieldy iMovie HD had become. He then started recoding it while he was still on vacation (dedicated huh?) and then showed the rest of the dev team his "streamlined" version when he came back. Thus was born iMovie '08/iMovie 7. While some might feel iMovie has lost something with the transition there are others who feel that its more user-friendly and intuitive. I'm more towards the middle ground, I see what was and what is, and I move on...

or buy Final Cut Express to get back what I used to have

P.S. Do you think that if you hadn't worked with iMovie HD you would have an easier time of iMovie '09? Not to quote Yoda, but "You have to unlearn what you have learned," i.e. take some time to review the video tutorials or get some workshop time in at your local Apple store to really get to know iMovie '09.

If you do have a copy of iMovieHD, you'll have to install it this way, which worked for me:

Double click on the iMovieHD6.dmg file to mount it, then drag iMovieHD6.pkg to the desktop to make a copy.

 Control-click on the package and choose 'show package contents'
 Drag Archive.pax.gz to the desktop, then open it. You will get a folder called 'Archive'. Inside are two further folders.
 From the folder named Applications, drag iMovieHD to your own Applications folder.
 From the folder named Library,
 Copy all 5 themes .bundles to the following path: Library>Application Support>iMovie>Themes folder
 Copy the iMovie Getting Started file to: Library>Documentation>Applications>iMovie folder
 Copy iMovie.mdimporter to: Library>Spotlight folder

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